1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 144. Bee Gees – Odessa (1969)

 

Thanks to their close association with the films Saturday Night Fever and Grease, I tend to think of the Bee Gees as a Seventies group, much parodied in my youth as the archetype of the “disco medallion man”. But this, in 1969, is their sixth album already, and it’s pretty far from disco (closer perhaps to Massachusetts and other swirling ballads in style).

It was originally meant as a concept album based around the story of the first track Odessa, the disappearance of a fictional ship meant to evoke the Marie Celeste or the HMS Erebus. But although aurally the songs hang together, thematically they are about things as disparate as the invention of electric light (Edison) or Marley Purt Drive about a man overwhelmed with children. Most of the album is somewhat folk/country rock ballads with orchestral backing, one track (Give Your Best) is more like a Gram Parsons country track. The final quarter of the album (it’s a double/triple album) features orchestral tracks; Seven Seas Symphony is led by a Rachmaninov style piano backed by lush strings, With All Nations is a stirring “international anthem”.

At the end of the album, the single First of May starts off sounding quite Christmassy, and then the lyrics mention “When we were small and Christmas trees were tall”, so I guess it was intended that way. The final track, The British Opera, retains the melody of First of May and builds on it to a crescendo of strings, like it was the soundtrack to a heart-warming redemptive Christmas film (I want to say starring David Niven and Anne Bancroft, for some reason).

Yeah. Different, and probably not one I would have gone to because I think that early mockery of the Bee Gees has made me prejudiced against them as serious musicians. I hereby apologise to the Brothers Gibb for misjudging, and prejudging, them, because I enjoyed this one. I even added the track I Laugh In Your Face to my 1001 Albums Favourites playlist, because I think it’s all we can do with some of the leaders and politicians we have these days who use divisive rhetoric to gain power. We are, as the song says, just one race.